Personal audio devices, including wireless telephones, such as mobile/cellular telephones, cordless telephones, mp3 players, and other consumer audio devices, are in widespread use. Such personal audio devices may include circuitry for driving a pair of headphones or one or more speakers. Such circuitry often includes a speaker driver including a power amplifier for driving an audio output signal to headphones or speakers.
One existing approach to driving an audio output signal is to employ a speaker driver, such as speaker driver 100 depicted in FIG. 1. Speaker driver 100 may include an envelope-tracking boost converter 102 (e.g., a Class H amplifier) followed by a full-bridge output stage 104 (e.g., a Class D amplifier) which effectively operates as another converter stage. Boost converter 102 may include a power inductor 104, switches 106, 108, and a capacitor 110 arranged as shown. Full-bridge output stage 104 may include switches 112, 114, 116, and 118, inductors 120 and 124, and capacitors 122 and 126 as shown.
Speaker drivers such as speaker driver 100 suffer from numerous disadvantages. One disadvantage is that due to switching in output stage 104, such a speaker driver 100 may give rise to large amounts of radiated electromagnetic radiation, which may cause interference with other electromagnetic signals. Such radiated electromagnetic interference may be mitigated by LC filters formed using inductor 120 and capacitor 122 and inductor 124 and capacitor 126. However, such LC filters are often quite large in size, and coupling capacitors 122 and 124 to the terminals of the output transducer may have a negative impact on the power efficiency of speaker driver 100.
In addition, such architectures often do not handle large impulsive signals. To reduce power consumption, a power supply voltage VSUPPLY may be varied in accordance with the output signal, such that VSUPPLY may operate at lower voltage levels for lower output signal magnitudes. Thus, if a signal quickly increases, adequate time may not be present to increase voltage VSUPPLY, thus leading to signal clipping unless a delay is placed in the signal path. However, adding a delay to a signal path may cause incompatibility with other types of audio circuits, such as adaptive noise cancellation circuits.